News for Speakers’ Corner, Sunday 10th December.

‘Who are you?’ I asked the watcher in my dreams. ‘Who wants to know?’ was the reply.
Paul Broks

1. Even before the chairs were out, Donny Dodd was keen to get cracking. For many years, Donny was a fiery speaker at Speakers’ Corner, speaking about Aboriginal affairs. He was entertaining, informative, and hard to tie down. Today, under a Morton Bay Fig tree not much older than he, he resurrected the Donny of old and spoke abut Australia’s Constitution of 2003, and the 1986 Australian Act regarding borders. Welcome back, Donny!

Donny Dodd, indigenous speaker.

2. As usual, the tireless Ray was near the kiosk out to save souls. Few evangelists are as committed. Whether or not you like Ray’s evangelistic message, you have to acknowledge his resolve.

Steve Maxwell, on the other hand, spoke about more Earthly matters: Australian politics and China. Here he is taking an undeserved break.

Cool Daddy, AKA Steve Maxwell

3. Should a synagogue be required to hire out its premises to the Nazi party for its anti-semitism rally? Should an African-American T-shirt maker be required to print one with the words, “Join the KKK“? Should a gay baker be required to bake a cake with the words, “Gays are X%#@*”?

“No”, rightly say some fundamentalist Christians, “and therefore, no church official should be required to marry homosexual people.”

The difference is: Jews, African-Americans and gays suffered persecution from their tormentors, whereas homosexual people have not historically or collectively persecuted Christians. Further, nowhere in the Christian Bible does it say that Christians are required to help God enforce His precepts. Indeed, it indicates the contrary: that we have free will. God will do the judging, and He doesn’t need fawning ‘policemen’ to assist Him.

This week the Australian parliament passed laws to give homosexual people the same right to marry as straight people. The ‘no’ voters are concerned about religious people having to act ‘against their good conscience’. Mr B explained why ‘acts of good conscience’ are not acts of good conscience at all, but acts of sycophancy and discrimination. His grasshoppers took the subject seriously and contributed significantly to the discussion.

4. A young man by the name of Tommy has become a regular, and today his mother accompanied him to see what the hell it was all about. Tommy takes insults well, is happy to interrupt, has a lot to say, and what he does say is tripe. He fits in perfectly. Today he asked about the subject of forgiveness, and of course Mr B had something to say about that. Then Tommy himself chose to get up and speak. He spoke well, and we hope he speaks again.

We don’t have a photograph of Tommy yet, so this will have to do until we do.

5. The ‘Something Nice’ segment, to charm some and irritate others. (From the Postsecret site.)

6. Good old Arthur is anti-fluoride. Fluoride is the substance put into our drinking water to help prevent tooth decay. Uncle Pete offered to explain how it protects our teeth, and the crowd almost threw him onto The Ladder of Knowledge. Pete explained in a clear manner the chemical processes involved, and then answered twenty questions. When he finished he received hearty applause for his effort. Thank you, Peter!

As it happens, we have a lookalike of Peter that someone sent in. The resemblance is eerie.

7. Grasshoppers, please note! If a speaker is talking about a subject (eg. over population) and happens to use a metaphor, simile or analogy to make a point (eg. he might make a passing reference to caterpillars), the topic does not become ‘caterpillars’!We don’t need someone interrupting the discussion to add to our knowledge of caterpillars. For goodness sake.

8. This week, ex-journalist Ben McCormack was fined $1,000 and given a three-year good behaviour bond for the “crime” of telling another pederast online what he’d like to do with boys. Ben had not bought or sold child pornography and had none on his computer. He had not contacted children on his computer and there was no evidence to suggest he had tried to groom any child in any way, anywhere. The only “crime” he had committed was to express his inclinations to another person who wouldn’t judge him on his sexuality and call him a deviate or pervert. In other words, the poor man had to undergo extreme humiliation, lose his reputation, and lose a thousand dollars simply because he told someone what he would like to do.

Mr B was scathing of our society’s self-righteousness, lack of compassion and intolerance, and of the judicial system.

Mr B believes that any pederast or paedophile that goes through life not acting upon their inclinations doesn’t deserve condemnation and punishment; they deserve a medal. And they deserve our compassion and our thanks.

9. It is commonly claimed that each of us possesses a subconscious. Mr B proposed an alternative: that within each of us reside multiple selves. In this rare instance, this scribe will take it upon himself to explain Mr B’s extraordinary claim.

According to Mr B, we might have a dominant self that we identify as ‘me’, and possess less developed selves that stay ‘in the background’. “After all,” he explained, “if the brain can produce one self, why couldn’t it produce more than one? Of course, one of those selves would have to become dominant for the organism to function properly.”

His grasshoppers didn’t take well to that idea!

Mr B listed five ways we might become aware of those other selves. ‘Dreaming’ was one way. Here is an example of a dream from Mr B. See if you can see why this dream might indicate the presence of multiple selves:

Classroom:Female teacher to schoolboy Mark: “Mark, what sound does a parrot make?”Schoolboy Mark: “It squawks.”Teacher: “No. Try again.”Schoolboy Mark: “It imitates sounds?”Teacher: “No. Forget it.”Playground:Schoolboy Mark to another schoolboy: “What was she on about?”Other schoolboy: “She wanted you to make the sound of a parrot squawking.”

Notice how the teacher’s question could be answered in two ways: the way she intended and the way Mark understood it? In the dream, schoolboy Mark did not understand what the teacher wanted. But the teacher knew what she wanted, and so did the other boy. How can that be? Presumably, Mark (the man dreaming the dream) had written the script, so surely all the participants in it would know what the teacher required. But no, schoolboy Mark didn’t. So, how could the man dreaming the dream create that ambiguous question and fool himself?

Answer: he couldn’t. Another self within Mark’s skull wrote the script with the intention of fooling the dreamer!

Can it be that the Frederick Kekulé, the man who suddenly understood the benzene molecule after waking from a doze, was given the answer not by his subconscious, but by another self within him who saw the problem in a different way?

When some people suffer extreme stress and feel they are separating from their body, is their dominant self leaving ‘the cockpit’ while they’re still awake? (They’re still within the body of course. The ‘rising’ above the body is part of the disassociation.) Could it be that in that extreme situation, there are now two conscious selves: one experiencing the stress and the other observing them experience it? But only one memory is incorporated?

Ernest Hilgard asked hypnotized people to immerse their arms in iced water for long periods and feel no pain. The subjects did so, and displayed and reported no pain. However, when Hilgard asked them if ‘at some level’ they knew that they were experiencing pain, they responded affirmatively. Could it be that one of their selves felt no pain, while another did?

10. How did you feel when a parent died? Grief? Relief? Nothing? Joy? Next week we will definitely explore that subject. Join us.
11. Mr B claims that The Australian Cricket Board has, over the last few years, “suggested” to its test captains that they should never enforce the ‘follow-on’. Why? Because when the follow-on is not enforced the game is likely to go on for a longer period of time. That means more advertising dollars for the commercial television broadcasters.

Uncle Pete disagreed. He says attitudes have changed over time, and that no weak team wants to bat last on a dodgy wicket. Uncle Pete is a silly mid on.

12. Mr B examined the gender pay gap yet again, with a fresh eye. He presented a study that found that tall men are paid, on average, 9% to 15% more than men of average and below average height. It seems we respect tall men. The speaker then pointed out that men are, on average, taller than women. He concluded by saying that perhaps the pay gap between men and women has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with height!

Initially, his tongue seemed to be in his cheek, but a few perceptive comments from his grasshoppers added an extra dimension to the argument.

13. The speaker explained how he tricked himself into completing an almost interminable poll for the Roy Morgan company. One of the poll’s questions asked, “Of the thirty government policies below, which three matter to you most?” The speaker was dismayed to find that none of the following were options:
– ‘the pollution of our air, fresh water and sea’
– ‘land degradation’,
– ‘habitat loss’,
– ‘over population’ and
– ‘the environment and its ecology’.

14. OurFacebook page is an enigma, though our Archives site is as important as the world’s biggest seed bank in Norway, and equally relevant to our day-to-day life.